One of the major lacking features in the newest Office: no Metro applications. In fact, the only reason Windows RT has a desktop at all is because the Office team was unable to create Metro applications in time for the release of Windows RT. I often thought this was a classic case of two important divisions within Microsoft not getting along and not being aligned, but now that I have my own Surface RT, I'm starting to realise that there's a far simpler, and thus more likely, explanation: Metro is simply not ready for anything serious - or for anything at all, really.

Beta, 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 are all public releases, available to everyone. So, the first four releases were terrible. Take away the beta if you want, and that still leaves three. The DPs were available to large groups of developers, so could, technically, be called public as well.

So you are being creative with counting decade old OS X (beta) releases while OS 9 was still fully alive creating a transition period to make a comparison with a finished Microsoft product, creating confusion with OS X users who don't understand what you are referring to, adding nothing usefull as it's not like there will be many former beta OS X users lining up to buy Microsoft stuff of the unpopular kind.

No, I'm just drawing a parallel between Windows 8 and the early Mac OS X period in that they represent similar periods in the two company's histories. This is a very common way for writers to create some perspective, and easily explain what we're dealing with. It's the biggest and most recent example of a company moving from one operating system to the next in a way that caused a break with the past. WinRT is the same thing.

There's nothing wrong with pointing that out, and I will not let fanboys bully me into not using obvious, innocent, and perfectly valid comparisons like that.

Beta, 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 are all public releases, available to everyone. So, the first four releases were terrible. Take away the beta if you want, and that still leaves three. The DPs were available to large groups of developers, so could, technically, be called public as well.

A beta is not a release and never was. Period. If something is branded as beta it is expected to have bugs and not ready for production use.

Yes, you can argue about how usable betas can be, but in any case, they're never supposed to be used in production and using beta versions to blame developers for buggy software is just plain unfair and wrong.

Microsoft, on the other hand, released Surface and Windows 8 as production ready while it was not.